The Big Fish

The Big Fish stands at Lions Park on Main Street, Millaa Millaa, and regional material also calls it out on the Millaa Millaa–Malanda Road. The current Queensland register places it at the park.

The joke the tourism material makes is a good one. This fish is a long way out of water – almost a thousand metres above sea level on the Atherton Tablelands, in cool wet dairy and rainforest country where the streams hold very different fish from the coastal estuaries. Anglers here chase barramundi in the stocked impoundments while others simply enjoy the rolling hills.

Millaa Millaa is best known for its waterfall, one of the most photographed in Australia, and for the waterfall circuit through the surrounding rainforest.

An unidentifiable fish is not a failure of the sculpture. Plenty of oversized animals in this catalogue are imprecise, and the record is unusual only in that the tourism body cheerfully admits it rather than confidently naming a species it cannot verify. That is exactly the standard this campaign has been trying to hold.

Who built the fish, when and from what are all unrecorded.